Podcast Script

Welcome back to the LL Study Guide daily review. I’m glad you’re here.

We’re walking through another six-pack of questions, and today’s set really hops around: modern art, movie ratings, German soccer, fast fashion, Texas cattle, and a cartoon Great Dane named by Frank Sinatra. So if you felt a little whiplash playing this match day, that’s totally fair.

As always, if you want the full write-up, extra examples, and links, you can check the study notes on our website at L L Study Guide dot com. I’ll just hit the key stories and connections here so you can listen on the go.

Let’s dive into Question One.

Question One asked:

[REDACTED] Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruiz y [REDACTED]. What are the first and last names redacted from the preceding name, of the individual who became, in celebration of his 90th birthday in 1971, the first living artist to receive a special honour exhibition at the Grand Gallery of the Louvre Museum?

The answer is: Pablo Picasso.

So that wild marathon of a baptismal name begins with Pablo and ends with Picasso. In Spanish naming customs, you often get both parents’ surnames, plus a bunch of saints and devotional names, which is why his full name goes on and on. But in everyday life, we just know him as Pablo Picasso.

The key trivia hook here is the Louvre fact. In nineteen seventy one, for his ninetieth birthday, the Louvre gave him a special honor exhibition in the Grand Gallery. That’s the same grand hall where you’d expect to see the Old Masters, not living artists. He was the first living artist to get that treatment, which is pretty remarkable for someone who had started out as the rebellious modernist.

When you think Picasso, your brain probably jumps to Cubism and paintings like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, but it’s useful to also mentally tag him to a few other things. One is his giant anti-war mural, Guernica, from nineteen thirty-seven. It’s in Madrid now, at the Reina Sofia museum, and it pops up in news coverage whenever politicians visit or talk about war and memory. So seeing Guernica in an article can be a good reminder that Picasso is absolutely central to twentieth century politics and culture, not just art.

He also turns up in pop culture all the time. There’s that proto-punk song Pablo Picasso by the Modern Lovers, which has been covered by John Cale, Iggy Pop, and others. And in movies, you get biographical takes like Surviving Picasso, with Anthony Hopkins, and playful appearances like his cameo as a character in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

For your quiz brain, the takeaways are: his first and last names, Pablo Picasso; the fact that he got that unprecedented living-artist show in the Louvre’s Grand Gallery for his ninetieth birthday; and that Guernica, Madrid, and those various songs and films are all good mental links back to him. If you want more details on his full name and that Louvre show, check the study notes on our website.

Let’s move from museums to movies for Question Two.

Question Two said:

What is the most notable distinction shared by the Best Picture Oscar nominees Toy Story 3, Babe, Beauty and the Beast, Sounder, Fiddler on the Roof, Airport, Hello, Dolly!, and Oliver! (the only winner in this list)? It’s a distinction they share with no other nominees, and a distinction to which nominee (and winner) Midnight Cowboy stands alone in a direct contrast.

The answer is: rated G.

All of those movies are Best Picture nominees that had a G rating, for “general audiences.” And Oliver!, the musical based on Dickens, is the only one on that list that actually won Best Picture. What makes the question work is the contrast to Midnight Cowboy, which is the only X-rated movie ever to win Best Picture.

A quick bit of structure: the modern rating system in the United States shows up in nineteen sixty-eight, with G, M or GP, R, and X. Later you get PG, then PG-thirteen, and NC-seventeen replacing X. So anything before that doesn’t have those labels.

Oliver! from nineteen sixty-eight is the only G-rated Best Picture winner in history. Later on, G-rated nominees become rare. You get big musicals like Hello, Dolly! and Fiddler on the Roof, family dramas like Sounder, and then, much later, animated or family-friendly films like Beauty and the Beast, Babe, and Toy Story Three. All of them are outliers in a category that usually skews at least PG or R.

On the other end, Midnight Cowboy comes out in nineteen sixty-nine with an X rating for its frank treatment of sex and prostitution and same-sex themes. It still wins Best Picture, and only later is it downgraded to an R when standards shift. That one detail — only X-rated Best Picture winner — is a classic trivia chestnut.

There are some nice memory hooks here. A lot of those G-rated nominees started as stage musicals: Oliver!, Hello, Dolly!, and Fiddler on the Roof were huge on Broadway or in London before they were movies. So if you see a classic G-rated musical film up for Best Picture in that era, it probably belongs in this little club.

Then you’ve got the animation angle: Beauty and the Beast is the first animated film ever nominated for Best Picture, in the early nineties, and Toy Story Three joins it later once the Academy is more comfortable nodding at animation. Documentaries and essays about the Oscars and animation almost always mention those two, so they’re worth sticking in your mental file.

If you’d like a clean list of every Best Picture nominee by rating, take a look at the study notes. For now, just remember: a tiny group of G-rated nominees, one G-rated winner, and one X-rated winner, Midnight Cowboy, sitting on the opposite extreme.

Alright, from Hollywood to the Bundesliga for Question Three.

Question Three said:

The city of Leverkusen, which sits on the Rhine between Cologne and Düsseldorf, is home to the champions of the German Bundesliga from the 2023-24 season, and is also (relatedly) the headquarters of what multinational corporate giant?

The answer is: Bayer.

So Leverkusen is a city on the Rhine in western Germany, between Cologne and Düsseldorf. The key trivia link is that it’s a classic “company town” for Bayer, the multinational pharmaceutical and life-science giant. Think aspirin, and a lot of other medicines and agricultural chemicals.

The soccer club there, Bayer zero four Leverkusen, actually started as a works team in nineteen oh four, founded by Bayer factory employees. That’s why their nickname is the Werkself, the Factory Eleven. In the twenty twenty-three to twenty twenty-four season, they finally won their first Bundesliga title, and they did it in spectacular fashion: unbeaten in the league.

For years, Leverkusen had a reputation for being the nearly team. They were called “Neverkusen” or “Vicekusen” because they kept finishing second and losing finals — most famously the season they almost won the league, the cup, and the Champions League and ended up with none of them. So that first title under coach Xabi Alonso was a big narrative shift and got a ton of coverage.

From a study standpoint, this is a nice example of a works team: a club directly tied to a corporation. You can mentally group them with PSV Eindhoven, originally Phillips’ Sports Vereniging, tied to the electronics company, and the original Arsenal, which comes from a munitions works in London. In Germany specifically, Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg, backed by Volkswagen, are the stock examples when people talk about corporate ownership and the so-called fifty plus one rule.

If you’ve ever opened a box of Bayer aspirin, that’s enough of a hook: aspirin, Bayer, Leverkusen. And now you can add unbeaten Bundesliga champions in twenty twenty-three, twenty twenty-four to that cluster. If you want more detail on their title run and that “Neverkusen to Never-lusen” storyline, check the show notes.

Now let’s jump to fast fashion with Question Four.

Question Four asked:

Identify the fast fashion e-commerce platform that was founded in Nanjing, China, in 2008 as ZZKKO, and took its current name in 2015 after dropping the letters “side” from the end of an intermediate name it had adopted in 2011?

The answer is: Shein.

Today, Shein is one of the biggest fast-fashion platforms in the world, but it started in a much more obscure way. The company began in Nanjing in two thousand eight under the name Z Z K K O, which looks like someone slammed the keyboard. Around twenty eleven, they were doing business as SheInside, and then in twenty fifteen they rebranded, basically chopping off the word “side” and becoming Shein.

That name change matters for trivia because a lot of writeups mention that exact progression: Z Z K K O to SheInside to Shein. If you ever see a question about a Chinese fast fashion site that used to be SheInside, the answer is almost certainly Shein.

You’ve probably seen its presence even if you’ve never bought anything there, especially through social media. “Shein haul” videos, where someone orders a massive box of clothes and tries them all on camera, are a whole genre on TikTok and YouTube. Those clips have billions of views, and they turned Shein into shorthand for ultra-cheap, ultra-fast trend cycles.

Because of that scale and speed, Shein shows up constantly in news about labor, trade, and the environment. There have been investigations and hearings about whether its supply chain relies on cotton linked to forced labor in China’s Uyghur region, and whether its production model is compatible with any kind of sustainability goal. The brand is often name-checked in stories about proposed “anti-fast-fashion” laws, especially in Europe.

So, to lock this one in: Chinese fast-fashion site, once called Z Z K K O and SheInside, then shortened to Shein in twenty fifteen, and now a go-to example in discussions of social media shopping, microtrends, and environmental impact. The study notes on our website go deeper into that timeline and some of the policy debates if you’re curious.

On to Question Five, where we get a little more outdoorsy.

Question Five said:

What now-flourishing bovid was saved from near extinction by the U.S. Forest Service in 1927, about a decade after a burnt-orange-and-white specimen named “Bevo” drew widespread attention to the breed?

The answer is: the Texas Longhorn.

Texas Longhorns are those rangy cattle with the huge sweeping horns, descended from Spanish cattle brought to the Americas and then mixed with Anglo-American stock. By the early nineteen twenties, they were in real trouble. Ranchers preferred other beef breeds that fattened more quickly, and Longhorns were on the verge of disappearing.

In nineteen twenty-seven, the U.S. Forest Service stepped in. Rangers, including Will Barnes and John Hatton, went out, gathered a small herd of remaining pure Longhorns, and established them at Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma. That government herd is widely credited with saving the breed.

About ten years earlier, though, a particular Longhorn named Bevo had already put the breed into the public eye. Bevo became the live mascot of the University of Texas in nineteen sixteen. He was a burnt orange and white steer, which tied nicely into the school’s colors. That silhouette — the head and horns of a Longhorn — is now one of the most recognizable college sports logos.

Texas eventually made the Texas Longhorn its official large mammal symbol in the nineteen nineties, and you’ll see Longhorn statues and cutouts all over the state. In college football broadcasts, the current mascot, Bevo fifteen, shows up on the sidelines in a big custom trailer, with horns stretching close to six feet across. Anytime broadcasters do a feature on the mascot, they usually touch on the breed’s history and near-extinction.

Western movies also helped cement the image. Films about cattle drives, like Red River and others from the mid twentieth century, often used real Longhorn herds, so that long set of horns and the lean body just became “what the Old West looks like” on screen.

The useful flashcard here is simple: Bevo is a Texas Longhorn, the Longhorns almost went extinct, and the U.S. Forest Service set up a rescue herd in nineteen twenty-seven. That’s your Science question, but it crosses into sports, state symbols, and film history, which gives you lots of hooks to remember it. More details and dates are laid out for you in the show notes.

Finally, Question Six brings us back to music and television.

Question Six said:

Frank Sinatra’s 1966 recording of “Strangers in the Night” inspired the name of what title character from an animated series that premiered three years later?

The answer is: Scooby Doo.

In nineteen sixty-six, Frank Sinatra records Strangers in the Night, which becomes a huge hit. At the end of the song, he does this playful little scat: “doo-be-doo-be-doo.” That specific phrase stuck in the head of Fred Silverman, a television executive at CBS.

A couple of years later, Silverman is working with Hanna-Barbera on a new animated mystery show about some teens and a talking Great Dane. The dog’s original name ideas weren’t quite right, and Silverman, thinking of that Sinatra scat, suggests “Scooby-Doo.” It lands perfectly, and the show debuts in nineteen sixty-nine as Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!

Strangers in the Night itself is worth recognizing. It hit number one, won Grammys for Record of the Year and Best Male Pop Vocal, and became one of Sinatra’s late-career signature songs. So you might see it in music quizzes, but here the trick is that the throwaway “doo-be-doo-be-doo” ends up naming an entire cartoon franchise.

Scooby-Doo of course goes way beyond that first series. Since nineteen sixty-nine, there’ve been multiple animated spin-offs, a long parade of direct-to-video movies, and at least two big live-action films in the early two thousands. There’s even a new live-action origin series announced for streaming, which keeps Scooby in the public eye for each new generation of kids.

The character also shows up in crossovers, like that famous Supernatural episode where the Winchester brothers get animated into a Scooby mystery. And countless parodies lean on that “Scooby-Dooby-Doo, where are you?” catchphrase. Knowing that his name secretly comes from Sinatra makes all of those a little more fun.

So lock this in: Strangers in the Night, nineteen sixty-six, “doo-be-doo-be-doo,” and out of that scat comes Scooby-Doo, who hits TV in nineteen sixty-nine.

Alright, that’s the full set for this match day. We went from the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, to a clutch of G-rated Best Picture nominees, to Leverkusen and Bayer’s unbeaten factory team, to the rise of Shein, to the rescue of Texas Longhorn cattle and the mascot Bevo, and finally to Scooby-Doo being named by a Sinatra ad-lib.

If you want to dig into any of these a bit more — see the full Picasso name written out, get a clean list of those movie ratings, or read more about Leverkusen’s season or the Longhorn rescue herd — you can find all the detailed study notes on our website at L L Study Guide dot com.

Thanks for listening, and for squeezing some learning into your day. Come back next time and we’ll walk through the next match day together.